


i and love and you

by singsongsung



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst ahead, F/M, intergenerational cycles of tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-12 00:20:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12947235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singsongsung/pseuds/singsongsung
Summary: Post 2x08.It sticks.





	i and love and you

**Author's Note:**

> I h8 this love triangle, but I love misery, so. Here's this. 
> 
> This does not take the 2x09 promo into account.

_History repeats itself. Somebody says this._  
_History throws its shadow over the beginning, over the desktop,_  
_over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters._  
[...]  
_I know history. There are many names in history_  
_but none of them are ours._  
\-- richard siken, "little beast"

 

 

“ _Until it sticks_ ,” Jughead snaps, looking at her with a darkness in his eyes, his pupils blown wide. 

The sharpness in his voice makes her vision blur, eyes clouding over with tears. She can hear the ache in his voice, beneath those harsh words; she’s learned to recognize it, to soothe it, but right now he won’t let her, won’t even let her try. 

It sticks. 

 

 

Betty finds that most of her heartbroken tears have already been cried, shed during the break up the Black Hood demanded, rolling down her cheeks as she clutched her knees to her chest and whispered an apology toward the windowpane. 

She goes home and curls up in her bed and sobs as quietly as she can until she falls asleep. In the morning, she regards herself in the mirror and finds that her eyes are eerily bright but bone dry. No more tears fall, not even in the shower, as she washes the scent of alcohol and leather off of her skin. 

She stuffs her black lingerie into a plastic grocery bag and marches it out to the bin that her father wheels out to the curb every Tuesday evening. 

 

 

Weeks later, Archie gives her a Christmas gift. 

“I didn’t get you anything, Arch, I’m so sorry; just with everything going on - ” She holds the gift at a distance from her body, like she wants to give it back.

He presses it closer to her with gentle hands over her own. “That’s okay. Open it.” 

She does. It’s a bit messily wrapped, with more pieces of tape than she imagines are really necessarily, but she removes the paper as neatly as she can. Inside, she finds a small wooden jewellery box, its interior coated with a minty green velvet. 

“You used to have one like that,” Archie says. He’s shifting his weight from one foot to the other like he cannot stand still as he anticipates her reaction. “Only it was pink and a little ballerina popped up when you opened it and it played a creepy song. Remember?” 

Betty nods slowly, and pulls her gaze from the box to his face. She doesn’t understand. “I - I can’t believe _you_ remember that,” she finally manages to say. 

“’Course I do, Betts,” he says, suddenly all boyish shyness. He quite literally scuffs the toe of his shoe against the floor, and Betty thinks _oh_. 

“Thank you, Archie,” she murmurs. 

“Merry Christmas,” he responds, and hugs her. 

The hug is warm and tender and _full_ , and Betty finds herself returning it tightly with her left arm, the music box still held in her right hand. He holds her in a way that makes her feel like she can breathe deeply enough to really fill her lungs, and it's a welcome relief, that feeling. She hadn’t realized how much she’d been longing for a hug like that; she hadn’t realized that she’d lost the person whom she thought would give her those hugs forever. 

After a long moment, Archie pulls back a bit. He takes a breath and then ducks down, pressing his mouth to hers. 

She doesn’t kiss back. She feels frozen, her eyes flying open. 

Archie pulls away, his cheeks flushed the same colour as his hair, mumbling, “Sorry,” but before he can get far, Betty closes the distance between them again, planting a kiss on his lips. It doesn’t feel right but it feels like _something_ , something sturdy, something without gossamer threads hanging free, ready and willing to be snagged and tugged loose if they aren’t tucked in firmly by her careful fingers every single morning. 

Afterwards, Archie smiles at her. 

_You want to love me,_ Betty thinks. The thought makes her stomach hurt, the kind of pain that burns. She says, “Merry Christmas.”

 

 

In the new year, on Valentine’s Day, a half-eaten box of chocolates discarded on the floor, Betty lets Archie take her clothes off and see her pale pink underwear, a plain, soft cotton set, no embellishments save for the little satin bows: one between her breasts, one at the waistband of her panties. He touches those bows. He undoes a clasp at her back with smooth, practiced fingers and slides fabric down her trembling thighs. 

Betty cries. Archie offers frantic apologies and strokes her hair and when he asks what’s wrong, if it hurt, she nods her head against his plaid pillowcase as if the pressure behind her eyes that ultimately turned to tears didn’t start long before he moved between her legs, as if she can remember a time when there wasn’t always a part of her that was hurting. 

 

 

Months later, Veronica will say to her, in a voice full of suppressed emotion: “I loved him. I wasn’t ready to say it, I didn’t even know if I could, but I loved him.” 

It will be the first real conversation they’ve had in a long time, and Betty will nod, because she wants to keep the peace. She will think, on some level, that it’s not her fault, because she wasn’t the one in a relationship with Veronica - that was Archie. But she will know, on another level, that some part of the hurt belongs to her, because she and Veronica made a promise once, over milkshakes. 

She will nod, and she will remember Jughead in that parking lot, the tension in his shoulders, the desperation in the pitch of his voice. _I loved him, too_ , she will think. _It didn’t make a difference._

 

 

Dibs on the diner go to whoever’s there first. Once, in January, before she is Archie’s girlfriend, back when there’s only been a kiss, Betty sees him there, in his usual booth in his usual pose, hunched over his laptop. She longs for him acutely, her throat going very tight, and she thinks that she could walk over there and show him her hands, show him the arches her nails have embedded in them, and he would sigh and wraps her fingers in his own and kiss her skin so softly and say, “I love you, Betty Cooper.” She thinks, she _knows_ , that they can walk this back. 

But then Sweet Pea and Toni and a boy she doesn’t know approach the booth from the counter, root beer floats in their hands, laughing over something. Toni slides in next to Jughead and says something to him, lets him on the joke, and he smiles. His mouth makes the shape so easily, that upward curve at the corners that Betty doesn’t think her own lips have managed in weeks. 

She feels like she’s cracking apart, splintering into pieces right there by the door of Pop’s, but no one can see, no one can tell, because the cracks are hidden beneath a pressed white blouse and a pair of blue jeans and a coral-coloured cardigan. No one can see. 

(Jughead could see. Jughead had seen.)

She washes blood out of her palms when she gets home.

 

 

Betty learns not to get that far. She always examines the diner’s windows before she approaches, looking for that familiar beanie. 

She sees him once when she’s with Archie, in a fairly good mood, her baby blue mitten clasped with his green one; sees him through the window, with Toni, in a booth. Toni is talking, gesturing with her fork, and Jughead is wearing that fondly tolerant expression Betty used to see so often, the one he tended to turn in Archie’s direction. 

She rips her hand from Archie’s and whirls around. Her heart is thrumming in her throat. 

“Betty.” 

She manages to look at Archie and finds that she’s been kind enough to pass some of her pain right over to him: he seems to be trying to fix his expression, but his hangdog look tells her that she’s wounded him. She swallows and says, “I’m not feeling well.”

He takes her hand again. “I’ll walk you home.” 

 

 

At her front door, Betty feels shaky, her teeth chattering, but not from the cold. As they stand on the stoop, facing each other, she realizes she’s afraid of goodbye. She’s afraid Archie will say - or, knowing Archie, ask - the words she cannot hear. 

_You’re still in love with Jughead?_

And something will bubble out of her, some kind of terrible screaming sound, if she is forced to say _I know_.

So she decides to speak first. She watches snowflakes gather in Archie’s hair and finds the will to open her mouth. “Arch, I lo - ”

In a strange twist of fate, a strange reversal of roles, Archie stops her from doing something stupid. He stops her by shutting her up. He shuts her up with a kiss. 

 

 

The word comes later, in the spring of junior year. They’re sitting on rocks on the bank of Sweetwater River, a hint of dampness seeping through Betty’s jeans, drinking cheap white wine out of red solo cups, and Archie says, with his fingers wound into her hair, “I love you, Be - ”

She swallows her wine and kisses him hard before he can say her name. 

( _I love you, Betty Cooper._ ) 

“Love you, too, Arch,” she says when they pull apart. She ducks her head down against his shoulder so that she doesn’t have to keep looking at his smile. 

The words come long after Jughead has gone to live with his mother in Toledo, long after he had a run-in with the Greendale police. Betty learns about the first event from Mr. Andrews, and the second from a whispered conversation she overhears between her parents. Neither she nor Archie get a goodbye, and part of Betty thinks _Juggie_ , thinks _oh, Juggie_ and wants to put her rusty sleuthing skills to use, to find the phone number of one Gladys Jones in Ohio, and say _You idiot. You absolute idiot. Juggie. You idiot. I love you, you idiot_ , once his voice has said hello. Another part of her wants to get on a bus to Toledo and shove her hands against his chest and demand to know how he could do this to her, how he could do this to himself, and to remind him that he was the one who called it - _them -_ off. 

She doesn’t see Archie for nearly a week after Jughead’s departure. When they finally meet up again, Archie mumbles something about working on a song with the Pussycats and Betty mumbles something about studying for the PSATs. Neither of them seems to know what to say, after that, so Betty takes off her shirt. 

 

 

High school graduation arrives more quickly than she anticipated. After she’s thrown her cap into the air, and taken photos with her parents and with Archie, Betty excuses herself to go to the washroom and ducks into the school. 

Her feet take her to the Blue & Gold office instead of the girls’ washroom. She skims her fingertips over a dusty desk and tries very hard not to think. 

 

 

Betty goes to college with her high school boyfriend: they both attend SUNY at Buffalo. She applies with every intention of majoring in journalism, but at the last moment switches to an education program. Archie majors in music. She spends four years doing her homework with the quiet strum of guitar strings as background noise; she teases him that she's forgotten how to concentrate without the sound. Archie grins back at her and she thinks, _You love me._

He loves her, and never, not once, does he say that he shouldn’t. 

He writes songs about a beautiful blonde he adores, and Betty pretends not to notice, when she’s tidying up and she stumbles upon an early draft of lyrics, that in the line that reads _blonde hair shining under the moon_ , he first wrote _brown_ , only to scribble it out and replace it with the colour of her own hair. 

 

 

When he says, “Elizabeth Cooper, will you marry me?” with one knee of his nice slacks pressed into the ground, Betty cannot quite force a _yes_ out of her mouth, but she nods enough to make up for it, and she hugs him with all her might. 

 

 

Breaking into the music business is hard for Archie, nearly impossible. The job earmarked for him, as future owner of Andrews & Son Construction, is easy. There is a vacancy at Riverdale Elementary, a position teaching third grade. They buy a house on Oak Avenue. 

They marry at the church both their families attended when they were young. Betty wants a small ceremony, and pleads with her mother until Alice acquiesces, a hint of melancholy in her eyes, eyes so similar to those in her daughter’s face. Reggie is the only attendee from their graduating class. 

The day is beautiful, and the pictures are the stuff of Betty’s preteen dreams, a beautiful couple beaming at each other, Archie’s eyes warm on her face as she looks shyly down into her bouquet. She slides a shot from their first dance into the frame of her mirror and idly twists the two rings on her left hand. 

It’s what she does now, that gesture, instead of curling her fingers into her palms. She makes sure to get her ring plated with rhodium on a regular basis, hiding the wear that occurs when she twists and twists and twists. 

 

 

Betty has two children, a boy and then a girl, Benjamin and Olivia. Archie parents them with boisterous, overpowering love, tossing their small bodies into the air, chasing them through the backyard, rousing them from sleep to watch fireworks every July fourth. Betty parents them a bit more carefully. She reads a lot of books and she walks a careful line, resisting the urge she sometimes gets to exert the heart-stopping amount of love she feels for them by controlling what they do. She is always sure to check in with them, always on top of their feelings. She wants so much for them she could burst. 

Ben and Ollie grow into little humans who remind her so very much of her husband. They remind her of no one else. 

 

 

Betty swings by Pop’s after school one day in the autumn, her hands still stained with the ink from whiteboard markers, her children talking over one another in the back seat. Once she pulls into the parking lot, she opens all of the windows a couple inches and turns to the kids, tells them, “I’m just going to run in and pick up our order. Back before you know it.” 

“Okay,” Ollie chirps. Her face is so sweet, so beautiful, that Betty can’t help touching her chin gently before ruffling Ben’s hair. 

“Hey!” her son protests, a huff that gives way to a smile almost immediately, and she smiles back before she gets out of the car. 

Inside, there’s already someone at the counter, so she gets in line. She reaches into her purse to grab her phone - Archie’s been known to text last-minute requests for more onion rings - and ends up accidentally elbowing someone. 

“Oh!” she says. “I’m sor - ”

When she looks up, she drops her phone. Her hand, now empty, curls toward her chest, resting against her heart. 

“Hey, Betty,” Jughead says quietly. 

She stares at him for a moment before she manages, “Hi.” 

He looks - he looks so much like his father, from the scruff on his cheeks to the bags beneath his eyes to the wry little twitch in one corner of his mouth. But he also looks like himself - like the boy she would’ve done anything for, would’ve given anything to. 

“Pickin’ up?” he asks. His gaze drifts downward and takes in her wedding rings. 

She takes a sharp, quick little breath. “Juggie, what’re you doing here?” 

He shrugs, shoulders lifting and falling beneath a leather jacket. She wonders how long it’s been since he’s worn his beanie. “I’ve got a thing.”

Betty half-frowns, and then realizes, her mind racing back through time: “It’s your birthday.”

Jughead nods and lifts a hand to rub at the back of his neck. “Yeah, uh… the crew’s doing a thing. I managed to avoid whatever it was they wanted to do for my thirtieth, but I guess thirty-three’s good enough for them. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right?” he tries to joke, but it isn’t funny, not at all, and his expression shutters in tandem with hers. 

They look at each other for a long time, or really, they _don’t_ look at each other, their eyes not quite meeting. Finally, in a gruff voice, he says, “You should swing by the Wyrm. You’d be welcome.”

“Me?” she asks, her hand fluttering near her neck as if she should have pearls to clutch. It makes her think of Veronica, and her heart constricts; it’s too much memory all at once. 

“Yeah,” Jughead says. He’s not looking at her at all now, his gaze on the floor. “For old times’ sake, Betts.” 

She swallows hard before a lump has a chance to form in her throat. “I - I’m not sure Archie would want to go there.” 

Jughead’s eyes fly back to her face. “Well then leave him,” he says, and for a beat - only a beat, though it seems to stretch on forever - they look right at each other, their eyes wide, their breathing shallow, his heart probably pounding as quickly as hers, before he adds, more softly, “At home.” 

There is a prickling at the corners of Betty’s eyes. She steps closer to the counter. “Happy birthday, Jughead,” she says, the words coming out on a tremulous sigh. She’ll never know if he hears the things she doesn’t say, because Pop greets her, then, and she takes out her wallet, and when she turns again, Jughead is gone. 

 

 

Betty gets back into her car and listens to the chatter of her children. At a red light, she twists her rings around her finger until the skin underneath begins to sting. 

It sticks. 

 

 

fin.


End file.
